Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn’s recent statement made to the Wall Street Journal, about the Apple iPad having cannibalized the sales of laptops and netbooks by as much as 50 percent, has been widely countered by several analysts who opine that the projected demise of the PC industry at the hands of the iPad has been greatly exaggerated.

According to NPD Group’s retail analyst Stephen Baker, despite the fact that the iPad has eaten up some market share of PC notebooks, the trend is nowhere close to Dunn’s observation of 50 percent.

Noting that “the iPad is a great product, but it's way too early to say that it's putting a significant hurt on the PC market,” Baker said: “In the future, in 2011, assuming that other tablets appear and the trend in tablets continues, cannibalization is likely.”

Saying that the iPad cannibalization of PC sales, as per an unreleased NPD survey, can be pegged “in the mid-teens,” Baker added that the iPad is still an early-adopter product, and its volume is clearly far less than what can be considered bothersome by the PC makers.

Commenting on the widespread analyst opinion that NPD data shows that the April-released iPad has already eaten up nearly 25 percent of PC notebook sales, Baker said that the 2-percent-or-so fall witnessed by the netbooks in July and August combined is not a result of the iPad release, but because the figures are being compared to extraordinary numbers posted in the same months of 2009.